


flesh / blood / sinew / nerve

by torrentialTriages



Series: feels like we only go backwards [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Maxwell lives AU, Nonbinary Character, Trans Male Character, autistic characters, hints of found family, mentions of parents being less than decent to their children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 22:14:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12803514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torrentialTriages/pseuds/torrentialTriages
Summary: they say that in the moments before you die, your life flashes behind your eyes.





	flesh / blood / sinew / nerve

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from a sappho poem.
> 
> theres a ridiculous lack of maxwell fics in this fandom and, um, i may not be the most qualified person to write her, but by god if i didnt at least try then who was going to? also she lives in this one. if youre reading this urbina suck it  
> yes, there will be footnotes.

**i.**

“You were adopted,” some adult in her life tells her thoughtfully, not looking at her as if her participation in this conversation isn’t the point. “Maybe you were sent downstream in a basket, and plucked from danger, like Moses in The Prince of Egypt.” [1]

Alana is eleven and knows that as much as she likes The Prince of Egypt, that’s stupid. She knows that nothing in her life so far has ever been as poetic as an animated movie, and nothing ever will be. Probably. Besides, Philipsburg doesn’t have any rivers. She knows that this person is wrong because she’s been told that Pastor Maxwell and his wife had adopted her from an orphanage in India, abandoned by a missionary father and a local mother, and Pastor Maxwell made very sure that she knew how much she owed to them for it.

She fidgets with the hem of her hand-me-down sweater. The adult doesn’t seem to be interested in carrying on the conversation, so she silently excuses herself and retreats to the cocoon of her room, too pink and too austere when the daylight filters in coolly through clouds like it is today.

Later she will hear from Pastor Maxwell that she is rude, leaving without being dismissed. She doesn’t care. She goes back to her pet project: a build-your-own-computer kit she saved up allowance for. Alana has learned that the only thing that matters to her in Philipsburg is herself. Well, not herself. It’s what she can do with herself that matters: what she creates with her hands, what she creates with her mind, what her body can do for her brain. For a moment, alone in her room, criss-cross applesauce on the floor, she can be free of the values her family cares about so much. She can be free of what the town thinks of her. She can be free of herself as she is when confronted with another perspective, forcing her to _be_ . She can just _do_ without having to _be_ a someone.

All too soon, her mother calls her down for dinner. As she gives her work one last survey, she feels herself settle back into existence, into a personhood she’s not exactly sure feels right, and turns off the light on her way out.

 

**ii.**

Minkowski is about to shoot. Minkowski has her gun trained as firmly as she can on Maxwell’s head, but her hands are still shaking, and Maxwell can’t trust her to make a clean shot. Facing her own execution, she can’t help but feel _annoyed_. With her accolades in sharpshooting, she’s very much a stickler for putting your mind aside to focus on the task at hand, and obviously if Minkowski can’t shelve her emotions like a proper Goddard employee (what a laugh), then she’s obviously not going to be able to kill Maxwell without majorly fucking everyone up.

“Her hands are shaking,” she confides to Jacobi through the intercom. “A lot.” She sounds flippant, but obviously she doesn’t want to die here. She’s got so much to live for, she tells herself. There’s so much more to discover.

And Jacobi knows this, and Jacobi fights for her, Jacobi is going to make Minkowski stand down because as much as Minkowski wants to assert herself, prove herself, she cares about her crewmembers’ lives (although why anyone would care about Alexander Hilbert is still beyond her). Hera, bless her little electronic heart, is also urging Minkowski to stand down, though that’s probably because she’s been taught in the Doug Eiffel School of Problem Resolution. Still, it works to their favor.

You always break a few eggs to make omelettes, that’s what Kepler says.

Kepler’s _files_ say that Lt. Renée Minkowski is one goddamn hard egg to crack, though, and it’s almost admirable, but really, if she didn’t want to get broken herself she should stand down right about now. Some people’s sacrificial urges were just so cute that she wanted to gag. And, well, she does want to gag, but for different reasons right now.

Alana Maxwell doesn’t want to die.

“Fifteen seconds,” Jacobi calls, his voice tinged with a familiar tenacious anger. Time is running out.

When it really settles into her, she finds... she’s scared. That unidentifiable jitter in her stomach, crawling up her throat, balling her hands into fists behind the chair? It’s fear. It’s stage fright, it’s anticipation, it’s the wild careening fear that she won’t have a future building the future. She won’t be there for Jacobi, Jacobi won’t be there for her. She had enjoyed spending time with Hera, really - and now... now.

Now. God.

“Eight seconds,” Jacobi grinds, and underneath it she hears _please, Alana, please be safe because I don’t think this train has brakes anymore god I love you more than Kepler. You’re my best friend._ “Here we _go._ ”

“How stupid are you?” _Daniel. Daniel Daniel Daniel come on the future is so bright._

The fuse is smoldering and her nerves are fraying.

Who gives a shit about Hilbert? He’s old. He’s outlived his usefulness, Decima hasn’t given Eiffel any problems, and if it was going to then who cared? The Hephaestus crew was never supposed to make it h-

The world shatters.

 

**iii.**

Oh, it wasn’t that Alana resented them for bringing her to America. She’d never known anything else. But she’d come to realize that _they_ resented _her_. Her own parents. Only God knew why. Maybe it was because she was so obviously out of place in family photos, next to her parents, her brother, Paul, 7 years older than her and their biological son, and they placed so much emphasis on the fact. Philipsburg wasn’t exactly the most diverse, either - the mining town was almost all white.

It wasn’t like there was any solace elsewhere in the town. She still has memories of being in third grade, being mobbed by her peers on her way to school, some boys who would pull at the weird girl’s winter clothes, hollering and whooping as they yanked her mittens and hat off of her and pushed her face-first into the snow. There was little to no use taking back her belongings after that, trampled and ruined and muddied, but she did anyway. If she couldn’t find them once she got back up, wiping the melting snow and dirt out of her eyes, then she just didn’t. Alana knew by that time that doing some things was just useless.

Oddly enough, _that_ had been the last straw for her parents.

“If you didn’t keep losing your stuff Mom and Dad wouldn’t be so mad,” Paul would tell her with all the worldly airs of a college student who no longer lived at home, like he was staging an intervention in the exact spot it was needed.

 _I’m not_ losing _them,_ Alana would think irritably. _They’re being_ taken _from me._ Her mouth says nothing.

 

Alana more or less enjoys school, she supposes. Especially math, because you can only either get it right or wrong. It reminds her of working out snarls in tangled yarn, which, at least to her, comforts her, trying to pull apart the world in front of her, making sense of it all.

And she always gets them right. It isn’t until she starts correcting her teacher in sixth grade on how to do decimal problems, even thinking she could teach the class herself, that they start to pull her out of classes, sitting with a stranger who asks her to do math she’s never seen in the classroom before, but it fascinates her and she devours all that the stranger explains to her in order to let her work them out and it’s not until she ends up in the principal’s office with her parents outside the door that she realizes she may be in trouble for it.

“She’s smart,” she hears outside the office. “ _Brilliant_ , for her age group.”

“What are you suggesting we _do_ , then?” She can just picture the way Pastor Maxwell is standing. Stance wide and stiff, arms folded over his chest, jaw set. [2]

“Well - we’ve already tested her,” the stranger says almost apologetically. “What’s the point of keeping such a prodigy in - this town?”

The door swings open, and Alana simply looks expectantly up at the adults gathered. Her parents. Her teacher. The principal.

“Alana?” The adults file in, and the principal sits down, looking at her expectantly. “We’re going to have a very important discussion with you.”

 

**iv.**

The most overwhelming thing about university has to be how old her classmates are compared to her. Sure, the 20-somethings in her classes intimidate her “peers”, but her peers are 18 year olds and that is still pretty damn intimidating to 16 year old Alana. She’s used to butting heads with adults and coming out on top, but these are... newly knighted adults. They’re within her reach but so alien to her, and she knows she’s alien to them too, this _infant_ , this still-gawky teenager with a body she doesn’t like, with too-big green eyes and a long braid she ties every day herself and always, always, a pile of books. She doesn’t know what to do with her new body. It’s painfully obvious.

See, Alana’s known all her life by now that the library is her best friend. Librarians are incredibly helpful and she appreciates their kindness, even if she knows it’s a little perfunctory. It’s no different at MIT. Although they’re all there by the same choice, she can’t really connect to her peers on a level other than polite conversation and a shared culture that they’re growing into. She knows that it’s to be expected when she’s playing a futile game of developmental catch-up to them. No one would invite a 16-year-old to parties where they illegally drank anyway. She knows that.

So she reads. When she isn’t completing assignments, she trawls the depths of her local libraries, the knowledge always calling to her, urging her to let the text flow through her, gathering in her head, her fingertips, making her a conduit for all this knowledge to make a _real_ impact in the world.

In between Fortran and Greek philosophy, she finds a scifi book in the wrong aisle. She doesn’t remember the title, or what it was about, but - but there was a character who felt just like she did, even if she didn’t realize it until the words were staring her in the face. She does a little more research, and starts to think that binary was made to be broken.

It does take a while to come to terms with, of course. Nothing like having your world’s laws crumble in one day gets accepted overnight. But it grows on her until she realizes it was inside all along, but now she has a name for it.

She cuts off her braid and it feels like freedom. No one notices but her parents when the holidays come, and boy, are they pissed.

 

**v.**

Maxwell almost feels like preening. As the surveillance watching the backs of two missions at once in fair Nantes, her two partners are entirely dependent on her database of knowledge and her ability to see more of their environments that they can. She’s made a bunch of slightly bitter (okay, pretty bitter) religion jokes about it so far that flew over Jacobi’s head, which she expected, but the exact way Kepler’s eyebrows raised when she pulled out the first one (probably about Adam and Eve being kicked out of Eden, she doesn’t remember exactly) was actually a little surprising. And she and Jacobi have catalogued all the ways Kepler raises his eyebrows by now. Occupational hazard, one might say.

But she’s come to appreciate Kepler, she finds. He kind of understands her in a better way than Jacobi does. They’re similar in their tenacity that stems from existence and not a drive like Jacobi’s does: their grip on their goals says _this is how it is because I create my own universe._

“Maxwell?” he breathes into the mic. “Be my eyes.”

“I should be telling you to be my hands,” she quips back at him. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

He laughs silently, wiggling his fingers in the gloves.

“Behold my servant,” he murmurs dryly, “Whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” [3]

She swallows hard. Her heart has started to pound. “Isaiah?”

“Good ear.”

 _Good girl,_ Pastor Maxwell would say, no warmth in the words. It throttles her, to think about it.

She watches Kepler sit down in the chair and turn on the desktop. “Please don’t.”

He hums in response. “Command me, Maxwell, we don’t have all night.”

Maxwell, tonight, is helping Kepler do her job, which is to break into the Carrentin [4] Biopharmaceutical database, which so fortunately happens to be situated in the same city as Jacobi’s mission. Three blocks away, to be precise, but that’s neither here nor there - Maxwell is more focused on the smaller scale, seeing what Kepler sees of the office, where he can theoretically access the entire library of data and information the company had unearthed, especially in the past few months. If he had the authority clearance, he could take everything with him.

He doesn’t, but he has a direct line to, in Maxwell’s opinion, a pretty damn fine hacker who’s going to tell him exactly what to do in her place.

There’s not a lot of fun in cracking locks, Maxwell thinks as she gives him the instructions, sometimes phonetically spelling out the exact letter sequence she wants. They’re just locks: you shove your key in, and if it’s wrong, then, well, the door simply doesn’t unlock for you. Now artificial intelligence, there’s a puzzle. She thinks it’s because she views all people as puzzles anyway - at the basest level every opinion, value, and personality trait is just another lock to put the right key in, but - but with _people,_ be they artificial intelligence or organic, she feels like she has to really _know_ the person to get in their head and make the right adjustments.

“In,” Kepler breathes, a little redundantly.

Maxwell sighs minutely. “Take out the pink USB.”

Kepler does, holding it up to the monitor light to verify. A Goddard original, two terabytes’ worth of space. If it isn’t enough, they’ve brought another USB, not to be confused with the third. He plugs it in, then rests his hand on the mouse. “And?”

“Just copy the entire computer.”

She can hear him subvocally choking on his own indignance, but all he says is, “Very well.” And he gets to work. It _works_. It’s the best she can do without being there.

They’re both sitting there for a very long time, which allows her mind to wander.

Once upon a time she’d watched Jacobi fall asleep in a hospital bed, skin alarmingly bloodless, arm severed and taken off to do whatever they did with amputated body parts, swaddled in blankets and gauze and tubes and medical equipment whose uses and names escaped her through all the tension in her mind. Once upon a time she’d been the only one sitting in that hospital room, clutching Jacobi’s clammy hand just under the IV needle, wracking her brains for the next step and coming up empty because this was never in the plan, she didn’t have a flowchart for this scenario. Once upon a time, Daniel Jacobi would have survived the near-death incident that cost him his arm, only to be cast out to die on his own, which she knew was already a fear of his ever since he’d had to leave Goddard for a while for top surgery. At this time, his chest scars were almost indistinguishable from the various mutilations accumulated on his body.

Kepler had rushed into the room at that point, and stopped dead in his tracks, as frozen and startled to see Maxwell as she had been to see him - in such a hurry, too, with such a desperate and focused look on his face that she almost turned away from the sheer shock of seeing him express anything this intense.

She did give him a moment to gather himself, though, standing up, gathering her things. “ _Well?_ ” she’d said, massively bitter, entirely guarded. “ _Are you here to cut him loose?_ ”

Kepler... had gaped. “ _No. I -_ no.” She knew she was going to pay for making him do that at some point (and she had since then). “ _I_ _just came from - Mr. Cutter has allowed me to put him in the trial prosthetic program Goddard is currently developing. And - you’re being assigned part-time to that department, until Mr. Jacobi recovers._ ” He’d looked at Jacobi, brows knitted. “ _Which... seems an adequate amount of time._ ”

Maxwell remembers raising an eyebrow. “ _Oh, so you like us that much. Wow. I’m flattered._ ”

“ _It’s not about what I think of Jacobi, or you, for that matter_ ,” Kepler had said firmly, and Maxwell only noticed he wasn’t quite looking directly into her eyes because she’d had infinite experience tricking people into thinking she was. “ _I just think he’s too valuable of an asset and team member to have to let go._ ” And then he patted her on the shoulder, which she’d learned from him invariably meant the conversation was over, and she’d left him there, standing at the foot of the hospital bed, expression inscrutably cryptic.

“ _I’ll do anything for him,_ ” she’d said over her shoulder. “ _You’d better not fuck this up._ ”

“ _I_ _would too,_ ” Kepler had said after her, still looking at Jacobi, who was just pale of dreaming, and she knew that was the most powerful admission of love for anyone she would ever get out of him in his entire life.

No, she thinks, Kepler does deeply care about his people. He just never lets himself know that, even if something slips through the cracks.

She tunes back in in time to catch the upload at 98% completion. The only sound this whole time has been Kepler’s slow, controlled breathing, and she wonders what he’s thinking about. Is he thinking about Jacobi? Is he thinking about the world outside this office? She just doesn’t know.

The downloads finalize, and Kepler makes sure to eject the USB before taking it out of the computer. “The virus?” he subvocalizes, expectant.

“Yeah.” She watches him fumble for the black stick in his pocket, verify its identity, then insert it roughly. He activates it with a few clicks, and they sit there as the virus tears into the database, Kepler significantly more antsy at this point if his camera feed was to be believed, field of vision jostling slightly.

“That’s it,” she whispers eventually. “Take the virus with you too. Get out.”

“Don’t worry about me, angel,” he snorts. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t _hit_ on me,” she hisses, watching his feed as he sneaks across the room.

“I’m _not_ ,” he growls, furtive as he pauses at the door. “You’re a seraph, Maxwell, you’re my guardian angel right now, you’re an unearthly multi-limbed monstrous humanoid. Isn’t that what you like?”

“I _do_ like being terrifying and of indiscriminate gender,” she admits, grudgingly mollified.

Then, when he gets back to the hotel, she’s waiting for him in the lobby. “Hey. Seraphs are made of light!”

He looks at her oddly. “It’s 3:40, Maxwell, go to sleep.”

“That’s the wrong kind of angel!” The clerk at the hotel front desk is looking at them oddly.

Kepler pulls her into the elevator, rubbing his temples. “Fine, you’re right. Cherubs are the fearsome ones. Happy?” [5]

“I’m pleased. But really? Not just any old angel watching over you? You had to go to the top?”

His smile is all teeth, but it comforts her. “I surround myself with the best, Maxwell. Nothing less will do.”

 

**vi.**

Goddard had really spared no expense even for their hotel rooms, comfortable but affordable enough not to arouse any suspicions, but Maxwell is really beginning to hate Hong Kong.

It isn’t Hong Kong’s fault. She finds the city itself perfectly fine, and she hasn’t had a chance to stretch her Cantonese muscles in ages, even if people still try to talk to her in English first, shocked at her fluency. But... either the walls in their hotel are too goddamn thin, or they’re not good enough to stop her from getting the most excruciatingly unwelcome level of detail about Jacobi and Kepler’s sex lives, short of actually being in the room (which she would legitimately kill to avoid if possible).

She sighs and slides off her bed, not bothering to change out of her ‘“home attire” (baggy sweats, usually-MIT-branded-but-not-on-this-mission hoodie, and messy bun). She could just put her earplugs in, or put on music while she worked, but sitting there knowing they were going at each other would have been too unbearable.

The air outside is rich, a gentle breeze fanning her face as the moisture in the air settles around her like a shroud. At this time of night the city is still bustling, lights shining cheerily on the street the hotel intersects with. She joins the throngs of people, looking for a convenience store or something lowkey to dip into.

She steps into the first one she sees, and marvels at how much like a 7/11 it feels.

“Hello,” says the cashier in English, a middle-aged man in a vertically striped dress shirt.

“Hi. _Could you speak with me in Cantonese? I want to practice._ ”

“ _Ah_ ,” hums the cashier, eyebrows dancing briefly. “ _Where’d you learn to speak Cantonese?_ ”

“ _I, uh, taught myself. I like learning languages._ ”

“ _That’s very nice._ ” He watches her browse the aisles and come back with a drink and some snacks.

“ _39 dollars,_ ” he tells her. [6]

She has to remind herself not to blink at the conversion rate. “ _Okay._ ” What else is there to do other than pay? Her change is a single coin. “ _Thanks._ ”

“ _You’re welcome._ ”

The shop is empty, but the idea of lingering tastes bad to her, so she says goodbye to the cashier and pushes into the gentle night wind.

A few more blocks takes her to the harbor, and she stands there for a good while, taking sips of her drink and watching the lights. Couples, families, old people, and young adults all pass her by as she observes the lights of Kowloon across the shimmering black river. It kind of makes her feel like she belongs here, where no one questions her existence, but lets her be, lets her absorb the sights at her own pace, body drinking in Wan Chai, eyes drinking in Tsim Cha Tsui, letting her mind unravel the snarls it’s kept tangled all day.

It makes her feel only kind of bad to be here, arming a small group of pro-independence protestors who were incredibly willing to go violent for the cause. Only kind of.

She stands there in the company of a willow tree, considering having a mindful moment like the Goddard therapist tells her to, then eventually decides it’s safe to go back. So she does, Kowloon lights dancing behind her eyelids as she walks back to the hotel.

“ _What is this about?_ ” is the first thing she hears from the other room, almost making her dive for her gun. It’s Kepler, and she can just imagine him running a hand through his hair.

“ _It should be obvious by now!_ ” Great, it’s Jacobi, which means they’re having another lover’s-spat-that’s-never-been-called-a-lover’s-spat-because-they-aren’t-in-love-haha-of-course. That exact inflection and all that. With flared nostrils as Kepler trips over the L-word and pretends he didn’t.

“ _Daniel - y- Jacobi._ ” She almost considers putting earplugs in, but that would leave her vulnerable. So instead, she sighs, and puts her slippers back on, and heads over to the next room to yell at them to stop being idiots and maybe invite Jacobi for a sleepover, if he’s done with being an emotional idiot by now too. She gets an hour-long earful about Jacobi’s feelings for her troubles, but for her, it’s more worthwhile than keeping Jacobi and Kepler alone in an enclosed room for any period of time.

After all, she still has more than enough ammunition to make fun of him at inopportune moments, like a few months later in Nice when they’re “tactfully disposing” of some unruly scientists, and hell if she’s going to pass it up. What else are siblings for?

 

 **vii.** [7]

“Anyone have a discussion topic of the day?” They’re sitting in Vertou, southeast of Nantes. It’s a lovely day. They’ve got some downtime in between the two missions, so they’re out of the city, relaxing in the smaller town. The sun shines down serenely as the team sits outside of a café, Jacobi squinting through his transition lenses at the sun every once in a while. Kepler leans back in his wicker chair, inviting his subordinates to talk.

“The human consciousness,” Maxwell replies promptly, cradling her french vanilla in her hands. “For example, the Goddard androids-” Both Jacobi and Kepler look around at that, but no one is around outside, save a blonde teenager with headphones and her small mop of a dog on the other side of the street- “- still have their minds housed in a central computer. So can they really be said to be thinking on their own, or does the fact that they think in the same computer mean every interaction is completely scripted? And who says that the same central computer doesn’t exist for humanity?”

“Who says we do any original thinking at all,” finishes Jacobi, and Maxwell nods.

“Exactly.”

“Well,” Kepler muses thoughtfully, pulling his ankle over his knee. “Can one _really_ say that we aren’t all empty husks whose consciousnesses are stored in a central computer somewhere only god knows where? How do we know for sure? We don’t know because we can’t prove the existence of the computer to be true or false.”

Jacobi sips his coffee. “Hey. Hey. If we _were_ all thinking in a computer, why’s there any need for conflict? Why let us do whatever the hell we want if there’s a central computer and, by extension, someone controlling that computer? Why isn’t anyone stepping in when w do something they don’t like?”

“But what values does this mysterious person have?” Maxwell puts her drink down. “Who says that anything humankind does is _wrong_ to them?”

Jacobi raises his eyebrows. “Why bring up a question that doesn’t seem to have a clear-cut answer, then?”

A small breeze picks up, ruffling her hair. She shrugs. “You can never be wrong.”

Jacobi’s eyebrows inch higher. “It’s more of a personality test than anything, is it?”

Maxwell grins. “Dammit, Jim, I’m an AI developer, not a doctor.”

 

**viii.**

“Do you think God’s controlling the quantum computer?” whispers Jacobi later, crawling into the basement of the high-rise building. He’s wearing, of all things, pale “nude” gloves that he’s picked at and complained to no end about the material being a sensorily disgusting experience, but they had no better ideas to conceal his identity and prosthetic on the cameras.

“What? Oh.” She watches his feed as he drops silently to the floor, straightens up, and brushes himself off. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Is that because you don’t believe in God?”

“Jacobi,” she snaps. “Pay attention.”

“Look, I’m just saying. If there’s a higher power, doesn’t mean they aren’t using technology we don’t have so they can play puppet theater with us.”

“Find a box,” Maxwell advises him. “You look like a delivery guy from, like, UPS.”

“Roger that.” He grunts as he lifts a random box, no bigger than an ottoman as far as Maxwell can tell. “Ugh, this is heavy,” he mutters, and hoists it. “Well, time to look like I belong here. Which way’s the elevator?”

“Through the door, then right.” She rubs her face wearily. “I - I don’t know. It’s been - the concept of God has been beaten into me for so long that _something_ stayed with me even if I don’t believe it’s true.” Three other people filter into the elevator with him, and she notes with relief that they’re all getting off several floors below Jacobi. “Do you believe in God?”

He waits until the doors have closed to reply. “I know something else is out there.” He takes a breath. “I... wanna believe something higher than us is calling all the shots - and don’t make an X-Files reference-”

“Oh, shut up.”

“But, see, like you said with the computer, I’m not really sure this higher power _cares_. Like, we’re burning on the stove while they fuck off doing important things.” The elevator opens, and Jacobi dutifully trots down the hallway.

“Room 1025,” mutters Maxwell. “Marc Gislason.”

“Is that French?” comments Jacobi.

“That doesn’t matter.”

Jacobi flashes his ID card (lifted from an employee an hour before) at the card lock, and hoists the box so he can navigate the heavy glass door. “So... run me through the plan. I wanna get this right.”

“Kill Gislason, take out the cameras, get out, don’t ditch anything on the property,” she rattles off.

“You sure?” He’s coming up on the door, and stops a few steps away. “Can’t I do a little wanton destruction?”

“Jacobi.”

“Just asking.”

“ _Jacobi._ ”

“Yeah,” he murmurs absently, irritated, “I got it. I’ll do it.” He sets the box down, then huffs and raps on the door. “ _M. Gislason?_ ” he calls with a pronunciation that almost makes Maxwell’s heart flutter with pride. “ _Y_ _a un paquet pour vous._ ”

“ _Entrez."_ So he does, briefly balancing the box on his hip, and jiggles the door open.

Maxwell sees the man look up from his paperwork, then frown. “ _T’es pas le facteur._ ”

Jacobi doesn’t answer. He simply walks up to the desk, setting down the box.

“ _Qui êtes-vous?_ ” she hears. Gislason’s obviously anxious, Jacobi doesn’t need to know what the question is to be able to understand him. " _Comment avez-vous entré cette f-”_ The sight of Jacobi’s gun shuts him up soon enough. Maxwell is finding that she doesn’t like Gislason’s voice.

Jacobi has that grin in his voice, she can tell, the sly slash of teeth he usually has when he’s about to ruin something. “You don’t need to know that, buddy.”

And he shoots the man.

It’s a silent affair, no more than a pop as Gislason slumps in his chair, glossy eyes shocked. Maxwell’s eyes are prepared, so the blur of Jacobi whipping around to shoot out the security cameras doesn’t surprise her.

“Okay, let’s hustle.” Jacobi quips grimly as he powerwalks down the hall, gun tucked away. “Time to get my deliveries done.”

“That’s a lame last line.”

“Time crunch, Maxwell. Bug me later.”

 

**ix.**

“Nice look,” toasts Jacobi, gesturing at her MIT shirt. He’s wearing a zip-up hoodie with the logo on the right breast, which had been total coincidence. “Seen any good hacks in your time?”

They’re lying practically on top of each other on her couch. She blows a strand of hair out of her face, considering.

“I don’t think I was that engaged with the... community. I just couldn’t connect. But remember the [piano drop](https://slice.mit.edu/2012/04/27/heads-up-the-baker-house-piano-drop/)?”

“Oh, man, that was fun. I kept my souvenirs from that.” Jacobi scratches his chin, grinning at the memory. “Got a black key once. So they did that in your time?”

“Yeah, they started doing it every year.” She shifts so her legs rest comfortably on Jacobi’s stomach, sipping at an aloe drink as she rests her other arm on his knee.

“Oh man, [Mario in the Infinite Corridor](http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2005/mario_bros/%20) was unforgettable too.” Jacobi closes his eyes contently. “The [cannon in ‘06](http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2006/mitcannon/) was my favorite, though.”

Maxwell snorts. “Of course.”

“Well, of course.” Jacobi shifts, and something seems to register to him. “Oh, yeah.” He takes a thoughtful pull of root beer. “What was your class ring like?”

“Oh.” Maxwell blinks. “I... didn’t get a ring. I didn’t want to pay for it, and it just didn’t... mean anything to me.”

Jacobi shrugs, a little embarrassed, as he pulls a necklace chain out of his shirt. The thick ring shines softly in the light as he shows it to her, distinctive [Grad Rat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_class_ring) [8] clamoring for her attention along with the decorative shanks as she leans forward, peering at it. Sitting on the chain is also a dog tag and a charm, but she already knows about those.

“I snagged one,” he confesses, quietly. “I dunno, I... you know community’s important to me. I dunno.” He looks away, rubbing his thumb over the beaver. “It was intensive, and it really made me feel like we were all in it together, so I wanted to... the ring makes me feel like I belong to something. You know?”

“Is that why you don’t wear it on your finger?”

He nods, chewing on his lip. “I mean, technically I wasn’t in grad school proper, but I wanted something that... wasn’t gonna change when I did. It reminds me now that I can rewrite my memories to make them... _right_ , you know, make everyone see me the right way in the present and the past. I guess I was kinda aware of that at the time too, but... yeah, it was mostly wanting to belong. And, well, as long as I was paying they weren’t gonna say no.” He looks away, tucking it back under his shirt. He’s clearly unwilling to dwell on the moment after being so vulnerable for once, and Maxwell is touched that he’s decided to confide in her. She decides to repay him by not lingering on the ring.

“When I was there,” she says softly, “I spent a lot of time in the library. And it seems so strange to think about it now, that one misplaced book changed my life, I suppose, because it was my gateway to knowing I was queer. And - and I’m not saying that the queer character was also autistic, that revelation came later, but I read it again recently and there’s definitely something there.”

“There’s something that changes when you’re autistic,” Jacobi says thoughtfully. “I think it was easier for me to accept myself because I was just like, ‘okay, this is how I am, weird brain, weird body, and all’, so I think my gay crisis was a bigger deal than when I realized I was a guy.”

“Noooo thank you.” Maxwell takes a sip of her drink. “I mean, thanks so much for the opportunity, but after _much_ careful consideration I’ve decided gender is just not the experience for me.” [9] She shrugs. “It was the opposite for me. I didn’t actually believe liking girls was sinful or inherently bad, but it was ingrained in me, so I was following this weird rule I didn’t truly believe in.”

Jacobi shudders distastefully. “My dad was really insistent on having ‘no homos in the house’. And he really didn’t like that I wasn’t going to go all-out if I was ‘really a guy’, kept holding all the stereotypes over my head because he really believed in them. And my mom wasn’t... well. She didn’t really care about much unless it was making sure I didn’t make Dad angry, so she wasn’t any help as far as I was concerned.“ A silence. Then, more for his own benefit than Maxwell’s, softly: “I looked up to him a lot before ROTC. I guess that’s why I believed him so much.”

Maxwell nods sympathetically. “But we’re here now. You know better now.”

“Yeah. I am who I am and he can go suck it.” Jacobi takes a long pull of his drink, and they sit there in silence, absorbed by the past, until the sun beginning to disappear reminds them that it’s time to come back to the present and the future waiting for them.

 

**x.**

Maxwell feels some days like she _is_ an AI. [10]

It would make sense, right? She feels artificial, like she built her humanity bit by bit, an elaborately coded veil that allows her to blend in with the outside world. She feels like if she dissected herself, took a knife to her flesh, in place of a brain she would find a motherboard, or a microprocessor, rattling around in her skull. It depends on how flippant she feels that day.

Maybe it’s her self-awareness that helps her understand how to create AIs. At the base of it, a thought process is a series of yes/no levers - every reaction, emotion, or decision is a product of a subconscious flowchart. And knowing that about herself helps her design the consciousnesses from scratch, then build quirks, likes and dislikes, different traits, different potential learning pathways into the matrix, each time feeling like she’s recreating herself. Getting closer to knowing herself, and in the process heaving the entire research field along with her.

She becomes aware of Dr. Pryce’s work around the time she claws her way up the AI Development food chain to senior researcher, and the futility is almost despairing. Why would she waste her time on retracing someone else’s steps? She doesn’t understand. Are they just the experiments, going over Pryce’s hypotheses that always turn out right? Who _is_ Pryce?

Kepler doesn’t seem to like Pryce, but seeing him interact with Rachel and Cutter, she realizes it’s more the reaction that Cutter invokes in him than Rachel does: whoever this Dr. Pryce is, he’s scared of them.

She’s intrigued, she admits. She thought Cutter was one of a kind (and not in the way they used it on her report cards), and so she can’t possibly imagine what Pryce must be like. Terrifying, for sure, but probably not as colorful as Cutter. No, Maxwell decides, knowing she will probably never meet Pryce, the mysterious doctor is probably very reclusive, given that almost no one knows their name. She can respect that. Being so visible in the company is just a side-effect of her advancements, but even so, she wants everyone to know that _she_ was the one to get it right. She can’t fathom just leaving one’s research out in the open, under anonymity - but Pryce isn’t even doing that, right? Maxwell wasn’t even supposed to know about what had succeeded Hyperion between their meeting and now.

In the meantime, though, she has to admit that powering through it herself feels rewarding enough. Maybe, with time and practice, she’ll surpass Pryce - or maybe she’ll become an AI herself. Maybe she can find a way to continually upload herself into a matrix and then she’d be unstoppable - well, except by physical limitations. It’s okay. She can ask Jacobi to help, or maybe she’ll figure out how to jump from body to mainframe to body and back. No repercussions. That’d be fun to figure out, how to leave her body functional while she explores digital space, and how to still be able to reintegrate her mind into her body.

The future is hers. Anything is possible.

 

**xi.**

Now this, _this_ is the meat of her entire life’s work. Life after Wittgenstein is simultaneously the best and most frustrating time of her existence.

And okay, maybe the Medium article was out of line because it hurt too many big-budget feelings. But really, she can’t _wait_ : artificial intelligence is only being held back by the fear of being upset by a revolution. In Maxwell’s opinion, once you start treating AIs like humans in this metaphor, it becomes real easy to see the decaying weight of the authority behind the pushback. No king wants his serfs rejecting their poor treatment. No bigwig in a company really wants to treat his factory workers like they’re _people_ , God forbid they have to think about treating an AI like a person. They should just buck up and think about it as a character development experience. The future always came with change.

_(pastor maxwell was big on character development for her and paul, used to make her stand in a corner and recite passages about what God had in store for sinners and those who didn’t repent for their deeds in their lives. they’re still burned into her mind. revelations. proverbs. matthew. she is sure to burn in hell for leaving the parish behind.)_

_(It’s at this point, waking up in a clammy sweat in the middle of the night, that she realizes that if her parents won’t leave her alone in dreams or in the waking world, she has to take at least one of these matters into her own hands. She sends the restraining order out as soon as she can, and it pleases her to know that Pastor Maxwell, beacon of God, isn’t above the law either.)_

She spends ages, _ages,_ battering at their self-righteousness, to no avail, and all this while she’s working on her own projects, and then - and then she spends half a goddamn year trying to fend Goddard’s advances because frankly, she’s incredibly leery of the megacorporation, and she’s sure she has better things to do than transplant her frustrations to another company.

This Major Kepler who keeps harassing her to leave the Nash honestly pisses her off on a personal level, too. Why shouldn’t he? Six months. _Six months_ of chasing Goddard in circles, telling them _no I’m not interested leave me alone! I said no! Stop it! Leave me alone!_ She feels seven again, telling teachers about the kids who push her into the muddy snow and steal her mittens and getting the answer “well, have you tried telling them to stop?”

Well, she has, so this is about the time where she decrees to herself that it’s time to punch the Major in the goddamn self-satisfied face.

And then... she doesn’t?

She meets Hyperion, is the thing. She meets Hyperion, so aptly named, and she doesn’t understand _why_ they’ve kept him secret for so long but she’s glad Kepler and Goddard have allowed her to know that the technology is out there. And _she_ gets to be there to help it along, once she catches up, of course, which is a joy and wonder in itself. At the Nash, she’d been too busy trying to knock ancient walls down to get anything of real substance done. At Goddard, the future seems so infinitely bright.

She still thinks Kepler is full of himself, though.

 

**xii.**

“So how long is this trip?” Jacobi asks, strapping himself dutifully into the shotgun seat he’d claimed five minutes beforehand.

“Not long.” Kepler adjusts the mirror, glancing at both of them in the reflection. “Maps says it’s about 18 hours from Cape Canaveral to Albany to Greensburg, but we’re gonna spread it over two days. Then we have a flight back to Canaveral waiting for us in Pittsburgh.”

“And we have to drive the truck to Georgia, instead of having it wait for us there?” Maxwell asks doubtfully.

“Think of it as settling into the trucker life, Maxwell.” He reaches for his concerningly large takeout coffee. “That way the wear and tear seem genuine, eh?”

Maxwell rolls her eyes.

 

The loading is easy enough. They don’t have to lift a finger - well, Kepler has to sign off on the cargo. Jacobi and Maxwell stretch, mock-spar, and debate on which flavor slushie is better. Maxwell fills her water bottle, and Kepler returns with several uniforms.

“Does this make me look fat?” Jacobi deadpans as he adjusts the jacket.

“Don’t look in the mirror any time soon, darlin’,” sighs Kepler, with the barest hint of a joking smirk. “Let’s get going.” So they all clamber back into the truck. Kepler starts up the engine again and the truck rumbles to life, pulling out of the loading bay.

“Weeeell,” Maxwell drawls in a Southern twang that neither man is completely sure isn’t making fun of Kepler, pulling her cap over her eyes as she settles into the back. “I figure right about now’s the right time to get some shuteye.”

Jacobi snickers.

She does actually fall asleep, waking up in what she later finds out is called Macon, Georgia as they pull into a gas station. She lifts the cap visor, squinting against the afternoon sun, feeling her joints creak back together.

“Afternoon, Maxwell.” Kepler smiles at her as he clambers out of the driver’s seat. “Care for a coffee?”

“Ugh,” she groans, stretching. “No thanks, Colonel. I will go for something to eat, though. Jacobi already left?”

“For sure.”

She finds Jacobi next to the milkshake machine, [11] staring at the selection as if he’s going to make a choice, and she taps him on the shoulder.

“Hey. You’re lactose intolerant.”

“You’re not my mom,” he murmurs automatically, then decides on a cake batter flavor, going through the motions of preparing the frozen cup without really paying attention. She pulls some lactase pills out of her pocket on habit and slaps it into his waiting palm. He smirks. “Thank you.”

“Uh huh.” She watches the milkshake machine dip its whisks into the cup, then wanders around the convenience store, settling on an iced tea and a bag of chips. She bumps into Kepler on her way to the cashier, and he squints.

“That’s not very healthy,” he says smoothly.

She shrugs.

“Alana?” He’s being quiet and he’s using her first name, which means he doesn’t want to be overheard or remembered by staff. That makes her think this mission is important, but she could be wrong. There’s a lot she doesn’t need to know about this assignment, in case it goes wrong. “Get something healthy.” [12]

She huffs. “Fine.”

He watches her bring a tuna sandwich up to the register before he leaves for the bathroom.

Jacobi is waiting for her outside, sipping his milkshake with a straw, leaning against the truck, jacket wrapped around his waist. It’s not a bad look on him: white undershirt, soft grey uniform with red piping. Vans. That’s the only thing that reminds her that he, like her, is still catching up on his lost childhood, in a way.

They stand and wait for Kepler together.

 

They stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the night. She gets her own room, as always, and Kepler insists they be up and running no later than 6 so they can make it out of there early.

The coffee is too shit to help with that, so she ends up napping in the backseat again.

 

The grass rolls by, West Virginia in the full swing of the morning when she wakes up, feeling old and desiccated.

“Do you think we’ll see Mothman?” Maxwell whispers after she’s gotten her throat back under control.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kepler tells her sharply. He’s been driving the entire day, and the day before that, too. The accumulating caffeine must be getting to him.

“Mothman,” is all she says again, stubborn, and settles into a sitting position, getting her tablet out.

 

“Jacobi,” Maxwell hisses at hour 10 after Albany. “ _There’s a Pennsylvanian town called Warren._ ”

“Oh my god.” He twists around, grabbing her phone. “Colonel, do we have time to go there after we drop the stuff off?” He stares at Kepler meaningfully, clearly fishing for a ‘yes’.

Kepler, of course, has better self-control than to roll his eyes, but he does drum his fingers on the steering wheel. “We’ll see,” he says eventually, sounding like every tired father waiting for his child to start behaving again.

“Colonel...”

“We’ll _see_ ,” he grits.

 

Kepler snaps at them for bringing up Warren, Pennsylvania, again, but it’s worth it.

 

“Alright,” Kepler says when they’ve dropped off the truck’s contents to a Goddard-run storage unit, putting his phone away. “Get back into your civilian clothes and meet me back out here in five. We’ve got a car, and several hours before our rescheduled flight from Pittsburgh.”

“Why?” asks Jacobi, bundling his jeans up.

Kepler sighs deeply. “I’ve rescheduled our flight. We’re going to Warren.”

 

The Allegheny National Forest is a lush visual masterpiece this time of year. It reminds Maxwell of Montana, in a way, which sets her neck a-prickle. The scale of Warren, Pennsylvania, matches its size, which doesn’t help in any way.

“You doing alright?” Kepler asks her lowly as they enter the gift shop. Jacobi is too elated by the wording of the merchandise to stay by their side, pinballing around the entire shop, snickering uncontrollably. [13]

She shakes her head. “I haven’t thought about Philipsburg in ages.” She examines a snowglobe. “And now...”

He nods slowly, watching Jacobi go through the shirts meticulously. “I... lived in a small Kansas town a while.” She doesn’t dare face him. Is he really volunteering information about himself? “I imagine anything else feels like a step up.”

“Mm.” Holy shit. Kepler’s confided in her. _Warren Kepler just confided something in her-_

“Hey Warren!” calls Jacobi gleefully from a shelf. “There’s mugs with your name on it!”

Kepler scoffs. “Daniel, I don’t - that’s -” He stomps over, but Maxwell can tell by the set of his shoulders that he’s pleased about it.

In the end, Jacobi piles about a metric fuckton of merch on the counter, which wakes up the cashier well enough. “I got you guys shirts,” he calls over his shoulder.

Kepler and Maxwell exchange a panicked cringe.

Of course, it’s a different story when they end up wearing the shirts on off days, but Jacobi proudly bears his “I was in Warren” t-shirt until a mysterious someone gets their drink all over his torso. It was in service to everyone, Maxwell tells herself. She’s done good. She’s done real good.

 

**xiii.**

The shot echoes through the room, and Maxwell’s brain shorts out.

Her body, however, reels with the impact of the bullet, and like a rubber band snapping, time scrambles to catch up from where it has frozen. She gasps as everything suddenly becomes overwhelmingly real again, and grits her teeth.

Her shoulder is bleeding. The muscle between her neck and shoulder - her trapezius is bleeding, to be precise, and it _hurts,_ by god it hurts, and she thinks she’s gone numb, emotionally, because all she can think is _okay. Okay._

“Commander!” cries Hera, a million miles away.

“You - _you killed Maxwell?_ ” Jacobi snarls, choked with horror, fury, every single pained emotion he’s ever experienced.

“No! No- I-” Minkowski seems to be just as shocked as Maxwell is. The gun is still smoking.

“Jacobi,” Maxwell hears herself manage. “I- I’m hurt.”

“ _Maxwell!_ ” They’re both sitting ducks, honestly, nothing they can do about this, because she’s tied up and he’s stuck on Kepler’s orders, but it doesn’t matter because Minkowski’s already lowering the gun and Maxwell knew it, Minkowski doesn’t truly have the guts to kill her. She almost feels distasteful pity for the lieutenant.

Somehow, unbelievably, they get through the coup without any more casualties. When the Hephaestus crew takes back the ship, Kepler holds her gaze long and unreadable as Minkowski roughly handcuffs him, and Jacobi won’t let her out of his view, something lost and starving inside of him like she had died, and she breaks away from looking at Kepler to having a silent conversation with Jacobi, reassuring him that she’s alright. He’ll be fine. She knows him like the back of her hand. He’ll come out of this more or less fine, and if he doesn’t, she’s there for him.

It’s Hera that’s her main concern down the road right now.

 

**bonus - xiv.**

“S-s-s-sometimes I wi-ish you’d _died_ ,” Hera tells Maxwell bitterly, crackling and hissing, during another session.

Maxwell thinks about it. She can imagine that timeline, just as surely as if it happened, and she knows that she’s too selfish to want any part of it. She thinks of the blessed peace that the restraining order and then her faked death had given her. She thinks of the self-teaching AI she coded, set to unfurl into operation if she did die, stored as a bit of untouchable unusable code in Hera’s servers until the time comes. That AI is so much a part of herself and a replica of herself that she thinks if she did die, it wouldn’t really matter. Monsters are persistent like that, never quite leaving one’s subconscious fears.

“I died a long time ago, Hera,” she says instead. “You can’t kill a ghost.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1 - the prince of egypt was released december 1994. maxwell would have been ten at the time  
> 2 - you know how wayne from letterkenny stands? yeah  
> 3 - isaiah 42:1.  
> 4 - carrentin is supposed to be pronounced like "quarantine" but with a french accent.  
> 5 - i dont know ANYTHING about angels or christianity the literal only thing i know is powerful angels are Scary. and also i read many waters by madeleine l‘engle a few times, which is an abysmal research background  
> 6 - $5 usd, give or take a penny.  
> 7 - yes. yes this segment is absolutely a reference to virtue's last reward  
> 8 - i wasnt entirely sure what kind of course jacobi was taking at mit. the only results i can find say the rapid development courses are a week long so it’s either fictional or he spent a workshop’s worth of time there, which doesn’t make sense given the timeline in his profile (four years between beginning of employment and ttbot leaves a lot of time between undergrad and ohio) so i want to say in the wolf universe this refers to an actual graduate program that took three or so years.  
> 9 - i once saw an article in which an artist identified themself as “gender-retired” and i just wanna say? Big Mood  
> 10 - im autistic. i knew this before i participated in [this survey](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B72o-T_UCnAjc2VkTERCRGp0RDA/edit), run by another autistic person, but reading the list of symptoms (7-8) brought more into perspective exactly how much being autistic saturates my life. i want to believe the wolf universe isnt as horrible for autistic people as this one, because its portrayed as scientifically advanced, which i hope runs parallel with social advancement, and if youve known me for a long time, you know i read jacobi and maxwell as autistic (among others) and theres nothing you can do about it. also yes all the ais are autistic too the end  
> 11 - so, growing up in winnipeg and not being allowed to go anywhere, i did Not know these things existed until that time in june ‘17 i roadtripped down to south dakota on my way to university and had my poor sheltered little mind blown. what do you mean you have the machine mix them right there thats wild. my guts died that week  
> EDIT;; its been brought to my attention not everyone knows what they are. [heres how they work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuyGoP9eXL0)  
> 12 - I SAID A HEALTHY SNACK REBECCA  
> 13 - if ANYONE has been to warren pa i DESPERATELY need to know if they have shirts etc that say something like “i was in warren and all i got was this lousy [x]” please, i need, it im like 12,  
> thank you so much for reading! i hope you enjoyed :D


End file.
